AI is hallucinating, while blogs including those from mainstream news sources are increasingly publishing AI-generated or AI-assisted content that can be misleading or simply wrong.
I even found an alleged quote from Apple stating that Apple Intelligence can be deleted. Other AI-generated answers and blogs parroting them claim that whether it can be removed depends on the “version” of iOS.
Yet I have found no reliable information identifying which specific iOS version actually allows Apple Intelligence to be deleted. It certainly does not appear to be the case with iOS 26 or iOS 27. At most, Apple’s own documentation says that iOS 27 requires up to 8 GB of storage for Apple Intelligence on supported iPhones. At best, I managed to shrink mine down to 6.57 GB and that's with Siri disabled.
So what is Apple’s official position on this? Can Apple Intelligence actually be removed from an iPhone, or does Apple only allow it to be disabled, leaving the downloaded models and their storage requirements in place?
There is another issue I find rather surprising: there does not appear to be a universal switch on the iPhone to disable Apple Intelligence across all apps and features. Instead, AI-related functions have to be turned off individually like Messages summaries, Mail summaries, notification summaries, Writing Tools, and so on. Apple’s own documentation lists these as separate controls.
I spent hours going through these settings. Imagine someone with hundreds of apps to disable them individually.
